Tuesday, November 30, 2010

39 DoFollow Social Bookmarking Sites

One way backlinks to the pages of a domain give it authority in Google over time. One strategy to gain these backlinks is to bookmark your content in social bookmarking sites that do not use the ‘nofollow’ tag. Generally speaking, the higher the PageRank (PR) of the site, the better.

Why Use Social Bookmarking?

Every time you add a bookmark to one of your pages in one of these sites you create a backlink. If you bookmark every piece of content you create in all of these sites you can build a lot backlinks over time. For best results, you want to make sure that the bookmarking sites provide a real, do-follow link. There is much debate as to whether or not no-follow links are still useful so I won’t get into that here. However one thing you do want is a real link. Several sites don’t provide real backlinks – they use their own form of dynamic link which does not count as a backlink.

One other thing to be aware of is that even though these are your personal bookmarks, you need to ensure that they are public – that way other people (Google really) can find them. But be careful, some bookmarking sites such as Connotea have a specific niche and probably wont appreciate your toenail clipping bookmarks.

Some Notable Additions

There are some bookmarking sites that are either nofollow or they use a dynamic link structure. However, leaving aside the nofollow debate for a moment, there is also a matter of traffic. If the content you are bookmarking is high quality then it could get votes from other readers and in the case of some of the big sites, getting your bookmark on the front page can result in massive amounts of traffic! In the case of particularly big sites such as Delicious, those bookmarks often get copied to many other places so one nofollow link in delicious could actually result in about a dozen links elsewhere though this tends to happen only with popular links.

In this situation I’d recommend submitting to these sites also, and just forget about whether or not they follow!

How to Bookmark For SEO

The purpose of this exercise is to generate backlinks to our content pages that help them rank better in Google. I’ll assume that each piece of content is optimised for some keyword. There are usually three places where you can add information for SEO:

The title

Tags

Description

Make sure your keyword is in all three of them. Note that the title especially usually becomes the anchor text that is used in the resulting link so the title is arguably the most important element to get right.